Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are becoming vastly popular in the areas of
surveillance and reconnisance for military and civilian use, however,
their instability due to their small size renders them useful to only
a handful of pilots. We propose implementing a GPS-based navigation
system for use in autonomous flight of micro air vehicles. Previous
efforts in this area have produced a vision-based horizon tracking
algorithm capable of sustained level flight with user input. Our goal
is to improve on this flight system using information from a GPS
receiver. In this paper we first introduce MAVs and the current
vision-based navigation system. We next discuss the integration of the
GPS navigation system by describing the design of the hardware system
and software algorithms for navigation and control. The GPS and
vision-based navigation system has been successfully built and
integrated, and are currently in the test phase of development.
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